ClarityRay Battles Ad B...

Some of you are probably reading this post with ad blocker right now — and to be honest, I don’t blame you. Sure, there’s the occasional amusing or genuinely useful ad, but not terribly often, so why not install a plugin and avoid the whole mess? Of course, those ads make money, so if ad blockers become widespread enough, it could be a real problem for online publishers (who have enough problems already). Israeli startup ClarityRay says it’s not something looming in the misty future — it’s happening now, and it’s only going to get worse. In a recent study, the company claims to have looked at “over 100 million impressions across several top-tier publishers in the US and Europe” finding that 9.26 percent of all impressions were blocked. The likelihood that someone is using an ad blocker varies significantly by browser — Firefox users are the most likely to use a blocker, followed by Safari (the desktop version) and then Chrome. The report goes on: The combined market share of Chrome and Firefox is only increasing. Moreover, the great popularity of ad-blockers points to a strong public need; as awareness increases, a free, widely available solution that is one-click away on every platform is bound to increase its consumer adoption. It is, therefore, our estimate that ad-blocking will double within 20 months. The company’s logic, at least as presented here, didn’t quite convince me that ad blocking will double, but I’m not debating the larger points. Naturally, ClarityRay is offering a solution. “We believe ad-blocking today is a lot like how pirate MP3′s were before iTunes: they point to a valid consumer need, but do so in an unsustainable manner business wise,” says co-founder and CEO Ido Yablonka. In other words, Yablonka wants to provide an alternative that addresses the complaints of the “ad intolerant” while allowing publishers to make money. To that end, the company offers two complementary products — one that bypasses ad blockers, and another that allows publishers to offer subscriptions for an ad-free version of the site. So if you’ve installed and ad blocker and you visit a ClarityRay customer, you’ll still see a single ad, Yablonka says. Don’t want to see it? Then pay. At the same time, Yablonka acknowledges that each publisher has its own audience and its own needs, and he says ClarityRay customizes the program for customer based on crowd analysis. Even though the company hasn’t received much coverage from the press, Yablonka says it’s already live with several large publishers, totaling 1 million unique monthly visitors. (I’ve asked him to point me to a customer site that we can see the technology in action, and I’ll update if he does.) ClarityRay has also raised $500,000 in funding from Saar Wilf, who sold his company Fraud Sciences to eBay for $169 million, and is now serving as the company’s chairman.

Twitter Now Honors Mozi...

Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today , 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce  that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter. As Do Not Track isn’t so much a technical solution that just blocks tracking cookies and more like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users, its success completely depends on being supported by publishers and developers. As for the major browser developers, Microsoft and Apple are already on board (and IE9, it is worth noting, already offers a somewhat more aggressive “tracking protection” tool). Google, too, plans to support Do Not Track later this year and Opera is building it into its upcoming Opera 12 release. A number of major online companies, including our parent company AOL, as well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have already pledged support for Do Not Track. For Twitter, which doesn’t rely on tracking and third-party advertising as much as other sites, pledging support for Do Not Track was probably not a very hard decision. The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT. — Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012

Twitter Allows Firefox ...

Twitter may further separate itself from the social media crowd by doing something that some might think is anti-social media (at least from a business point of view). That something is allowing users to opt in to a ‘Do Not track’ mode when using the Firefox browser. The New York Times Bits blog reports It’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collected personal data about its users. A lot of data. Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter. Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information and any third-party cookies, including those used for advertising. The Do Not Track functionality will only work if a Web site agrees to acknowledge it. Couple this action with Twitter’s recent vigorous resistance to turning over information about a user who was part of the Occupy Wall Street ‘movement’. Because Twitter’s focus is more about the news and information that a user passes along vs. the user itself, they can play thins kind of user friendly game MUCH more easily than Facebook can. Facebook is completely dependent on the individual characteristics and data of users so advertisers can decide who they want to target. Twitter, on the other hand, is driven by keywords and hashtags which are different forms of determining what a Twitter user may or may not want to see with regards to ads. Has Twitter found a way to further differentiate and distance itself from Facebook and even Google in the privacy realm? If yes then they have scored a rather large coup. Let’s face it, no matter what happens in Friday’s IPO Facebook will always be positioned as a necessary evil by users. This love / hate relationship is one that makes Facebook more susceptible to the whims of the individual especially if they are feeling wronged by the service (and, of course, another viable social option exists which is a big question mark). Twitter is saying “Hey, it’s cool if we don’t have more data on you than you would like us to have.” and that is like a blast of fresh air in the day and age of ‘nothing is sacred or private in the online world.” Twitter is already different but this makes it more so and that is a very good thing for them and for users. What’s another advantage of Twitter’s move in this direction. Well, how about having the news be “announced” by a high ranking official of the FTC? Yup, that’s the government telling an Internet company “Nice work!”. To Twitter that is priceless. Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said in a statement, “As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned this morning, Twitter now supports Do Not Track.” Ms. Penner added: “We applaud the FTC’s leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track.” Twitter has been laying low as of late which isn’t hard to do in this Facebook IPO feeding frenzy. Maybe we should already start to ignore the IPO and see what the competition is doing? After all, unless you are getting rich from this IPO it should be business as usual and, despite the hype, there is much more to the social marketing world than just Facebook. Thank God for that.

Shortform Launches Book...

Video curation platform Shortform is launching a few new features that will make it easier for its video jockeys (VJs) to curate and share content with friends and followers. The hope is that by introducing a browser bookmarklet, as well as implementing Facebook Open Graph, the startup will be able to continue its hockey stick-like growth in video minutes consumed. Shortform is introducing a bookmarklet for adding videos to their channels. The bookmarklet will work with all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer), making it easier for VJs to instantly update their playlists without having to open a new tab, copy and paste the URL, etc. In addition to adding videos to their channels, the bookmarklet will also find all videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and CollegeHumor that are on a given page so that users can choose between them. In addition to the new bookmarklet, Shortform is also rolling out Facebook Open Graph integration, which will seamlessly share the channels that users are watching. Shortform already had launched a connection with Facebook that let VJs and viewers to share what they were watching with friends on the social network, but they had to click a share button to do so. The new social feature will automatically share channels and VJs that viewers are watching, so long as they opt in. According to Shortform CEO Nader Ghaffari, the choice to share channels and not individual videos was not just meant to avoid spamming user news feeds, like some other high-profile video startups have over the past few weeks. It was also because Shortform is, at its core, about curated collections of videos, and it hopes to highlight those collections rather than individual pieces of content. The goal is to grow its user base, but also to increase engagement — that is, the amount of time that users spend watching videos through Shortform channels. Since the beginning of the year, the startup has seen a 400 percent increase in the time spent per month, with users watching more than 16 million minutes of video in April. One way it’s currently doing that is by encouraging its VJs fighting for viewers’ attention. The site runs a weekly VJ competition , where it rewards the top 50 VJs, as determined by the total amount of time users spend on each of their channels. Shortform is awarding a total of $2,500 to the top channels every week, with the first-place VJ getting $600, second place getting $400, third place getting $200, and so-on down the line. While the competition is one way to reward the VJ who are driving users to the service, it’s just one step toward providing them with more money. In the future, Ghaffari says he’d like to have a more formal revenue-sharing agreement with VJs as the startup ramps up its own monetization.

Firefox For Android Bet...

Mozilla was late to the mobile revolution and is still playing catch-up with Firefox for mobile. It’s starting to look as if Firefox for Android is slowly becoming a competitive player on Google’s platform, though. Today, Mozilla is launching its most radical redesign of its browser for Android in beta . This new version features a redesigned interface that, according to Mozilla, “blends in with the Android user interface.” The beta now also features support for Adobe’s Flash plugin, as well as the usual performance improvements and bug fixes. Firefox for Android Beta is now available in Google Play and unlike Google’s own impressive Chrome for Android, it will work on any phone running Android 2.2 and above (including, of course, Ice Cream Sandwich). For now, it’s only available in English, though. The highlight of this release is, without doubt, the new native user interface. This new update, however, also features an improved version of what Mozilla calls the “ Awesome Screen ,” its smart mobile homepage for Firefox. In addition, the Firefox team has worked on improving startup and response times for the browser, as well as the browser’s overall graphic performance. Thanks to hardware acceleration, web apps and games on the browser should now also run significantly more smoothly on Firefox for Android. Redoing the user interface, of course, should also give the browser a bit of a speed bump. Mozilla also promises better text readability in this version by using font size inflation. The fact that this beta now supports Flash will likely raise some eyebrows. It’s worth noting, though, that by default, plugins are only loaded on touch.